These topics will be dealt with in more detail throughout this
bulletin.

Status Report - Improved Company Information

Work is wrapping on the data entry portion of the new company information system. I have been busy gathering and posting the expanded information into the new company information file, and that part of the process is coming to an end.

The next step will be to build the new retrieval system for that company data, which will be added to the GOWIN.EXE program file. That will replace and expand the previous company information page.

As we explained last month, company information is found as an option to a single product display. The new company information page will be accessed the same way.

There are two ways to get to a single product display. First, you can use the second choice on the Red Menu "Display a Single Product". Second, you can double left click on a product in a comparison. Once you do either, the Display Single Product window will show the details for an individual product. One of the options found on the "Options" list (top of screen) is "Company Information" (third last choice on list). If you click on that you will get the company information.

It is that page that will be changed and enhanced once this new work is complete.

Since I last reported on this, we have come up with another new idea that we think will be great as we move forward. Instead of having the company information display from a window in our program, we are going to export and pass the company information data as an .html file that will pop-up in your browser.

Further, we will control the look and feel of that .html page with a template file that basically sets out the format of that display. What that means, for the future, is that our programmer can spend less time working on the "look and feel" of the output. That work can be handled by myself or Jeremiah, and it's Jeremiah who has better taste than I do when it comes to look and feel.

It also means, looking down the road, that for those enterprising subscribers who would like to modify the content, and the look and feel of the display, they will be able to do so by modifying the template file. This concept is a great deal like the use of templates that we have in Pick 12 (called "styles"), or the use of templates that we have for our internet versions of the comparison software. By contrast to the Pick 12 styles, we will be able to use the .html commands to format the page.

This work will take longer than we originally planned, but it will become a foundation for other future displays and print-outs. In the future, it will mean that the new CQS.EXE program file will allow you to be able to make changes and modifications to the look and feel of any of the print-outs in Compulife.

So please excuse us while we take this opportunity to grind away on this development. We believe it holds great promise for the entire system.

If you want to read more about what the new company information file contains and will do, I would encourage you to go back and read the February bulletin:

We have noticed a definite up-tick in the volume of www.term4sale.com consumer requests for agents. I took a quick look at January/February request volume, versus the same period last year and I would estimate that we are up over 60% from last year. That means the improvements we have made are paying off.

We are able to see the requests as we receive copies of each email that is sent to each subscriber as a result of the email request function at the web site. While we make no effort to contact the consumers ourselves, and NEVER provide those emails to anyone else, it allows us to get an idea of the volume and size of policies that consumers are asking to purchase. It also means we can monitor the amount of contacts any one subscriber has received.

Of course none of that includes consumers who actually phone agents directly. We have no way to monitor that activity and unless a consumer tells you they got your name from the site, there is not much you can do to determine how many are calling you.

We did add our toll free number to the site and from time we get calls from consumers who have questions or are looking for quotes. That convinces us that some consumers still prefer to use the phone and talk to someone live, and we expect subscribers are getting those calls in addition to the emails.

When we get calls from consumers we use that opportunity to encourage the consumer to call the listed agents directly and we explain to the consumer how to get the list. For those who do not have internet access, we actually give out the phone numbers and names of the three agents in their area.

All this to say that we think 2014 is off to an excellent start for those subscribers listed at www.term4sale.ca. If you are a subscriber, and are not sure you are listed, send us an email at: